Minnesota: Bank robbery defendant gets monthlong Ramadan delay

Did he rob any banks during Ramadan? Just wondering.

This guy was headed to a Federal prison. I used to work in such an institution (as staff, not, er, guest) and, as I've noted before, Federal prisons allow Muslim inmates to observe Ramadan quite rigorously. So why not just sentence this bank robber and let him make his observance from the inside?

Wasn't there a woman who refused to stand when the judge walked into the courtroom? Haven't the Gitmo trials been put on hold until the end of the "holy" month? Didn't Hasan refuse to shave? Don't cab drivers in Minnesota get away with not allowing dogs (SERVICE DOGS OR NOT) into their cabs? Or riders carrying alcohol...? Don't muslims get special pool times? By the way, there was (twice) a muslim woman in our neighborhood pool completely dressed and in the water....aren't there rules against swimming while clothed? I thought bathing suits were mandatory. I need to go to the next association meeting....

Where will this end? When will we wise up? Would our president step down if a million protesters showed up at the White House and demanded he do so? ....call it the GRINGO SPRING.....this is all very disturbing.....

For all those Americans who watched the popular cable series Oz -- a drama about prisoners at a federal penitentiary, where (with the sole exception of one white guy, the lead actor) the only decent and non-violent prisoners were the Muslim prisoners (mostly black actors, and quite pointedly not Nation of Islam type Muslims, but rather mainstream Sunnis) -- that show helped to reinforce the myth that Islam is some kind of spiritually purist Religion and its practitioners largely "spiritual" and concerned about peace, justice and right living. The lead actor who plays the unofficial "leader" of the prison Muslims (again, the only gang that on the show does not indulge in hatred and violence) oozes spiritual nobility and selfless self-discipline, and walks around with his feet not touching the ground, exuding an arrogantly humble aura combining Martin Luther King Jr. and Ghandi.

I quote here from an old essay of mine that reviewed three different popular TV/cable shows each with its own PC MC spin on issues related to Islamic terrorism:

Excellently crappy televsion: Oz, The Unit, and 24.

Quote:

Oz comports itself as a tough, gritty, brutally honest dramatic depiction of prison life in a maximum-security prison, salted and peppered with grimly sarcastic black humor.

As part of this brutally honest portrayal, they dip their toes into the waters of political incorrectness by showing black prisoners behaving routinely in thuggish and violent ways—both in prison and in flashbacks to the violence they committed that got them sent away in the first place. When it comes to the black Muslim prisoners, however, the show consistently depicts them as model prisoners, behaving in mature and calm manner when they are not exercising their right to spread out their prayer rugs and prostrate to Allah. Concerning this latter behavior, the only prisoners who show mocking disgust at this display of Islamic religiousity are those white prisoners who belong to the clique of racist white Aryans.

While there is a confrontation early on between one leader of the non-Muslim blacks and the leader of the Muslim blacks, the show does not depict the non-Muslim blacks, nor any other prisoners, expressing anything more than a kind of baffled yet resigned diffidence with regard to the Muslims—and indeed, more often than not there is a kind of implicit if grudging admiration for their apparent “discipline”. Furthermore, the aforementioned confontation between the non-Muslim blacks and the Muslim blacks concerned the former’s anger at the latter’s attempts to dissuade other prisoners (including blacks) from taking and trafficking in drugs. The simple yet massive fact that al Qaeda and the Taliban account for a major part of the worldwide heroin and opium market and in fact explicitly use the drug trade to further their Islamic jihad shoots this preposterous notion out of the water.

...

If this were all that Oz does with its Muslim characters, it wouldn’t be so bad. They go further and depict the revered leader of the black Muslim prisoners -- one "Kareem Said", dramatized all too unctuously well by actor Eamonn Walker -- as a noble, virtuous, Ghandi-esque figure who may burn with indignation at the “injustice” of the system that is “oppressing” his “brothers“ but never in terms of physical violence. Indeed, the show depicts him regularly counseling others against violence and toward “peace” and even has him physically intervening once or twice to prevent violence. He is so widely regarded as a man of peace, in fact, that the prison warden and other officials ask him privately to help them manage an escalating problem of a cycle of revenge violence going on in the prison, and he grudgingly acquiesces in their deeply polite and respectful request. At least from the episodes I saw, the black Muslim and his followers are depicted as the only prisoners who seem well-behaved and civilized.

What took the cake for me, after all this nauseatingly preposterous propaganda in the guise of art, was a scene where the black Muslim leader vehemently stays the homophobic ire of an influential black gangster who has shown interest in possibly joining Islam. The non-Muslim black has a blood brother who is gay, and one thing leading to another, he comes to a point in his homophobic anger where he wants to kill his own brother—and then the black Muslim Wise Man takes a hold of his arm and in vividly strenuous language tells him that this is not the right way, that he must be patient and loving with his brother and slowly show him the error of his ways. The spectacle of seeing a Muslim counsel a non-Muslim against homophobia and toward a more “patient” and peaceful resolution of the problem—when we know that Mohammed himself according to a canonical Hadith explicitly advises Muslims to kill homosexuals who commit homosexual sex—was just too much cognitive dissonance for me to tolerate. I had to stop watching it then and there.

[End quote]

I bet if this judge was a fan, he slurped it all up with a sincerely gullible appetite.

It would be nice if we could just blame Oz for our society's myopia about Muslims. Unfortunately, though, as we know all too well, the myopia has throughout our Western societies a vast multiplicity of sources of promotion, mostly a welter of sincerely well-intentioned collusion with an interest in upholding the virtues of PC MC -- whose Prime Directive is

"Thou shalt not be bigoted, nor even think bigoted thoughts, against anyone who is, or who even might be, non-white and non-Western";

and whose First Commandment derived from that Prime Directive is

"Thou Shalt Never Condemn Islam nor Muslims"

-- followed by the Second Commandment:

"When the Data Forces Thee into a Corner of Having to Notice the Violence, Injustice and Hatred Muslims Profess and Perpetrate Around the World, Make Sure to Inoculate Islam and Muslims from any and all Blame, by Constructing an Artificial Appendage Called "A Tiny Minority of Extremists Who Are Trying to Hijack the Great Religion of Peace Islam and Who Are Likely Motivated by Poverty and by All the Ills Which Our Evil Western Imperialism and Post-Imperialist Meddling Have Fomented in Muslim Societies".

Once again the Muslim is way ahead of the American judge on every detail of law or lack there of. We can almost feel the commitment and purpose of this highly educated ideology we call the religion of peace.

If it wasn't so outragous in might be laughable. Why can't the court see that these words and puzzel pieces don't fit together?

"Mark Edward Wetsch".

Somehow I doubt that his parents were born anywhere in the 'Middle East'.

He's not a black American convert, either.

His mugshot can be seen *here*.

http://vinienco.com/2012/07/21/mn-muslim-convert-bank-robber-awarded-continuance-ramadan/

I wonder what his 'shahada name' is, and why we aren't being told it?

I wonder when, and where, exactly, he converted to Islam?

Has he been "inside" before? If so: is he the fruit of Prison Da'wah? (I have encountered a number of news reports from the UK that reveal that in UK prisons the Muslim inmates - who form a percentage of the prison population far exceeding the estimated percentage of Muslims in the general non-prison population - are the most violent and aggressive gang of all, and relentlessly bully prisoners of other backgrounds; any prisoner who is identifiable as being nominally Christian is particularly targeted for mistreatment. Non-Muslim prisoners have been known to convert to Islam simply in order to be less bullied by the Muslims).

More on Wetsch here.

He has quite a rap-sheet.

http://www.twincities.com/localnews/ci_19931418

And yes, he has been 'inside' before: for fraud on the grand scale.

"He pleaded guilty to four counts of mail fraud, and in October 2005, U.S. District Judge David Doty sentenced him to nearly four years in prison and ordered him to pay nearly $1.6 million restitution to two nursing home companies and an insurer.

"Wetsch was scheduled for release in April 2009 and was then to spend three years on supervised release. He accrued good time and was released early, but records in state court show he soon got in trouble with the law.

"From September 2008 to July 2010, he racked up convictions for speeding (twice), not wearing his seat belt and failing to obey a traffic control device. He had fines and courts costs totaling $688.

"His illegal behavior turned more serious, though, and it drew the attention of his probation officer. In August 2010, Hennepin County prosecutors charged him with domestic abuse for violating an order for protection."

And all of *that* was *before* he started robbing banks.

(This article makes no mention of his being a convert to Islam. I would very much like to know whether he became a Muslim *before* he went to prison the first time (and if so, when), or whether he converted in prison (which is what I am inclined to suspect), or whether he cottoned onto Islam at some point after emerging from prison.

Fraud and robbery...and domestic violence of some kind...he's the kind of person for whom Islam is simply tailor-made.